Episode 8 - The Realities of Emotional Trauma

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, everybody. This is Dr. Todd, and welcome to the rehumanization podcast. Living an awesome life with emotional trauma. Now, if you've been following me for a while, you're probably asking, well, wait a minute. I thought this was the Dr. Todd podcast. What's with this rehumanization thing? Well, uh, truth be told, as I've been recording more videos and posting more videos and uh developing an identity for my for my kind of place in uh in the marketplace of ideas, right? I mean, what is it that I bring to the market that is unique, that is new? What is my passion? What is it that I'm really trying to say? What makes me unique among the million podcasters out there where I have something unique to say? And so I've been struggling with this for a little while. And over the weekend I had quite a bit of clarity around what it is that I represent. What do I value? Where's my passion? And what I have discovered is that I have a passion and a unique perspective that comes from decades of experience and professional training in the area of emotional trauma and relationships, overcoming adversity, um, how to how to rebuild a life when you've experienced a tough childhood or you've had to go through some pretty tough times in life, right? Because not only have I had the professional training as a therapist, right, and all of that clinical experience working with people, but I've also had to live it, right? I mean, I uh I didn't come from a really great family, right? I mean, there was a lot of divorce, there's a lot of addiction. In fact, you know, my both of my parents um were alcoholics who were practicing and had a lot of conflict and ended up being divorced when I was a junior in high school or sophomore in high school. And I was a junior in high school. And um, and a lot of the members of my family have had addiction. Uh, we found my uncle dead in a hotel room. He had uh been using drugs and drank a ton and had fallen and hit his head and died of a brain hemorrhage. My cousin was found dead on the garage floor from acute alcohol poisoning. I mean, there's just a lot of addiction in my family, and I too had experienced a lot of addiction. Uh and alcoholism and addiction hit me very, very early, and it hit me very hard. And you know, by the time I was, I started using when I was 13, 14 years old, and by the time I was 19, I was uh living in an abandoned house and suffering from just profound depression and all of that, right? And I mean, I I graduated high school with a 1.9 GPA. It was during the days when, you know, these kids who everyone thought would be dead by the time they were 20, they just pushed them out of the school. And so I I graduated with a D uh grade point average from high school. And um, and so I've had to overcome a lot in my life. And most of the people who are in the field of psychology, and and this this may be a little bit, you know, a little bit uh unfair, but uh most of them just have not had to overcome that level of uh of difficulty in life, right? Where there was a lot of a disadvantage very, very early in life and uh and struggling with addiction and depression and suicide, suicidal ideation, and um just having a real broken sense of self. And so my unique voice, I think, is um not only have I worked in the clinic with people who have struggled in their relationships and with their own sense of self, but man, I I I've had to overcome that myself in life in a big way. You know, I mean, for much of my life, I just I struggled with just this deep internal sense of just like emotional collapse and a lot of PTSD kind of symptoms, right? Where I would have these just bizarre emotional flashbacks and I would dissociate and make really, really dumb decisions based on um, you know, based on kind of my emotional trauma. Because the reality is that there are just times if you've experienced emotional trauma, there are just times when that kicks you out of the driver's seat of your own life and takes over. And now you become kind of a kind of a helpless passenger as you as you just are along for the ride of what all these emotions and all of that kind of stuff are doing. We just become flooded when and we lose the ability to act with intent. And I know what that feels like. I've experienced it a lot. You know, I I've experienced having just these sudden visions of like somebody running up and stabbing me, or these just you know, incredibly just violent thoughts that seem to come out of nowhere. And I'm like, what the hell? And I know that this comes from very, very early childhood stuff, right? And if when you experience those kind of things and you try to tell other people about those experiences, they look at you like, oh my God, you know, I don't know what to do with that, but you're making me very uncomfortable. So either just shut up or you're gonna have to go away, right? And I know what that feels like. I know what it feels like to carry that kind of that secret, if we could call it that. It's not a secret because we don't want to tell. I mean, if anything, we want to be able to share what we are experiencing with somebody who will be there and help us work through that and and be remain present with us so we don't feel like a freak, right? And so when I was thinking about, you know, about all of the videos that I've been producing, the book that I wrote, and another one that I'm writing on relationships and all of that kind of stuff, it really came down to one thing. I want to help people who have experienced emotional trauma in their lives live the best life they can. And I can, I have an a unique perspective on this because not only do I have all of the professional credentials, which frankly are probably not as important as I have experienced and overcome these things myself. And during that journey, I have learned an awful lot of things about how to do this effectively, what is real, right? Not just, you know, some of the things that sound good on paper, right? About you just have to learn to love yourself and things like that. It's like, dude, if it was that easy, nobody would be suffering from emotional trauma. If we could just make a decision to be happier, or just, you know, stand in the in front of the mirror and do some affirmations, or, you know, kind of just question our own limiting beliefs, dude. I, you know, none of us would be would be struggling with the uh with the effects of emotional trauma. But it's just not that simple. It just isn't. And there are a couple things that I think, just in this kind of in this third first podcast of the new way, right? The next evolution of the Dr. Todd podcast, now that we're talking about uh re you know, the rehumanization brand, right? Because we are so dehumanized by emotional trauma. Emotional trauma robs us of our humanity, it robs us of our of our sense of self, it robs us of our ability to experience connection in a way that feels close and safe and connected, right? And so my my work going forward is all about how do we rehumanize ourselves, right, when we have experienced emotional trauma. That is what we all want. We the anybody who has experienced trauma, um I this is a strong word. I can't speak for you, but uh most of the people that I've worked with, the one thing that they want is just to feel freaking normal, right? Is just to feel stable and just to not have all of this crap get triggered. And if it was a matter of just making the decision to, you know, to be over that, we would have done that a long time ago. And, you know, and instead what ends up happening is that, you know, is that people struggle with searching for answers and going to therapy and reading books and doing all of these things. And and while some of it may work and some of it may work well, I mean, EMDR, for example, is a is a form of therapy that for PTSD-like trauma, it's absolutely fantastic. Um, attachment, relational kind of trauma that more affects our sense of self. These are two different kinds of things, right? There's the PTSD stuff, and then there's more the relational uh attachment trauma. Um, you know, things like EMDR don't do as well for, you know, things like our self-concept and healing that intense feeling of that there's something about us that is just flawed, broken, bad, sick, or wrong, right? That there is something about us that is just inherently flawed, that we are just like one of those people who is uh is just meant to suffer, or who will never experience happiness, or who nobody will ever understand, or who nobody will ever love. And I mean, all of those thoughts have gone through my head. And I'm sure if you're watching this and you've experienced trauma, you've experienced some of those things too. And uh, and I think it's important to understand that a couple things about emotional trauma that I have just come to understand over the decades of really working uh on my own healing journey as well as uh the clinical work that I've done, is that emotional trauma is never fully healed. That's just the reality of the situation, right? Excuse me. There is no point in our lives that we can unexperience the things that we have experienced in life, right? Those experiences change our neurology, they change the way our brain works, our it changes how our brain processes memory, how it processes emotion, and all of that. And so the idea that that trauma is something that you can just get over, or something that you can, you know, just fully heal from, uh, is just it's it's not real. It's not true. And I think that the whole idea that somehow you can get over it uh only serves to further undermine our own sense of self. Because it's like, well, if you can't just let that go, then there must be something wrong with you. Or, you know, if you went through therapy and you haven't been able to like be cured, then something must be wrong. And here, read this book. This helped my other friend. And if somehow now it didn't, it didn't help you feel all that, all that much better, then there must be something wrong with you, right? And the the reality is that you know, reading books and going to therapy and you know, and and doing a lot of things like you know grounding and embodiment and you know, I mean, a lot of that kind of stuff, it it's not that there is no value to that. I want to make that clear. There's there is value to to all of that. But most people find, particularly those who have experienced a little bit more on the on the severe side of emotional trauma. And whether that was, you know, it came in the form of abuse and rape and violence and things like that, or it was in emotional abandonment or constantly being shamed or whatever it is, if we've experienced more extreme forms of that, it's like a lot of these tools just become less and less effective as an antidote to the feelings and emotions that we experience and some of those trauma responses that we experience. And it can be super, super frustrating because it's like everything can be going well, and then somebody says something or we smell something. We're in an environment or something for whatever reason just triggers some kind of emotional response in us, and then all of a sudden we feel ourselves flood. And we could see ourselves saying things and doing things and acting way in ways we could recognize that we're doing it, but we can't stop it. And oftentimes the things that we say and the way that we act will oftentimes push other people away and just further make us feel like a freak, that there's something just fundamentally wrong with us, that we are just crazy. And in most cases, uh obviously there's some there are some people who have you know true personality disorders and things like that. But in the vast majority of cases, I mean, people with trauma who do crazy stuff, it's not that it's not that you're like crazy per se. It's just that you have a normal brain, right, that has been exposed to some really bad stuff. And because of that, it has some of these compensatory mechanisms that have that it is built that is built up as a way of uh trying to allow you to survive in that chaotic and unhealthy environment. And now that you're in adulthood, a lot of those things can get triggered and come up, and they they just definitely do not suit the circumstances, right? I mean, they are not the right responses, they are not appropriate responses for the circumstances, but we have them because our brain, the wiring in our brain was affected by some of the things we experienced earlier in life. And some of the things that we do, we later look back and are almost embarrassed by, or can just be like, what the hell was I thinking? And I will give you an example from my own history. There was a time, I can't believe I am uh I am admitting this to the uh to the YouTube universe. But there was one time when I was sitting watching a movie, and all of a sudden I was just flooded with this sense of panic and this sense of urgency. Like I didn't, I had no idea where it was coming from. And uh, and and I had no understanding of trauma responses to put any kind of context around what I was experiencing. All I knew was all of a sudden I just felt flooded. I felt this sense of kind of panicky urgency that I just had to go out and do something. I had to get out of there. And so I went out and I took the front seats out of my car and dragged them over and threw them into a dumpster, and then walked back inside and plopped back down on the couch and watched TV, feeling better, like I had just accomplished something. Like, you know, there was something that I, you know, somehow that that made me feel better in the moment. And afterwards, I'm like, I have no front seats in my car. And so I had to take an upside-down milk crate and set it where the driver's seat should be and try to drive around like that. And I was driving like that for two years. And what's crazy about that is it never occurred to me while I was riding around with this milk crate as a seat to get another seat. I mean, it just never occurred to me because one of the things that one of the things that emotional trauma does is it affects our our sense of agency. It like it it impacts our ability to feel like we can have make some positive change in our life. Oftentimes we just feel very stuck and very trapped, and it's just like, oh well, I'm just gonna have to ride on a milk crate. You know, this is just the way it is. There's no possible strategy that I could employ that that, you know, to remedy this situation. Right. It's almost like this real learned sense of helplessness that oftentimes uh that oftentimes accompanies um, you know, emotional trauma responses. I mean, that wasn't a week ago. I mean, that was many, many years ago when that happened. But I I look back on that, and I I mean, obviously you could go, ha ha ha, what a crazy thing to do. Man, you must have been totally insane. And it's it's like, or you could look at it and within the context of a trauma response. And it's like, wow how what a powerful, what a powerful thing emotional trauma is where it can motivate us to end relationships, quit jobs, break things, sell stuff, um, take the front seats out of your car and throw them away. Uh just you we just lose our ability to act with any kind of rationality, or uh because that I mean the rational part of the brain just goes offline when we're when we get flooded like that. And when um when we are very, very early in our uh in our recovery on an emotional trauma, it's like one of the one of the things that I have found to be very, very helpful is just an understanding of what emotional trauma is. Because once I could say, oh my God, that's why I act so freaking crazy. That's why I do stupid stuff. That's why, you know, there are just times when I I like build, you know, build something great, and then the next minute I just, for whatever reason, I abandon it or I run from it or I destroy it. And it's like, but and I don't understand why. And once I understood a little bit more about emotional trauma and how emotional trauma hijacks our brain when we have those emotional triggers happening and what that feels like and how that manifests, once I understood that better, then I had a better sense of how to navigate through those times when I get flooded, right? And when I get flooded now, which doesn't happen nearly as often and not nearly to this to the same degree, but still, I mean, I have a trauma brain, right? And so things like that still are going to emerge. But when they do, I'm like, oh, there it's happening. And I'm not going to necessarily believe what I'm thinking right now or what I'm feeling right now, because what I'm feeling right now is likely a trauma response. And it is not kind of who my normal, my normal self is, right? And even though I'm I'm feeling a little bit Frustrated, or I'm feeling flooded right now with a sense of hopelessness or a sense of depression or a sense of, you know, everybody hates me, or you know, whatever it is, right? Um, nobody's ever gonna like me, you know, kind of thing. And when I feel that now, I'm like, oh yeah, I I get I get what that is, right? Because I I understand how trauma shows up and I know the things to look for. And so because I know what to look for, now I no longer have to allow my trauma responses to kick me out of the driver's seat of my car of kind of the driver's seat of my life, right? So I can remain in control. Uh, you know, I I understand what's what's happening right now and that I'm I'm flooding from some stuff. But when I'm when I'm in that state, I have kind of a fire escape protocol, so to speak. It's like I I have predetermined kind of how I'm going to navigate through those situations so that um I don't suddenly find myself being flooded, not understanding why, and not knowing what to do, and just allowing what I feel in the moment be the determining factor of how I behave and the things that I say, if that makes sense. And so uh the the whole purpose of this channel, um, you know, my YouTube channel and my Substack and my podcast and all of the work that I do, the books that I write, is uh all intended to do one thing. If you've experienced trauma, you're gonna get triggered. It's just gonna happen. That's never going to completely go away because your brain is different because of the trauma that you have experienced. But what will be different is how severe those reactions will be, right? And how that is actually gonna impact and show up in your life. Because when I'm feeling triggered right now, I can just say, like if I'm talking with my wife, I could just say, you know what? I'm feeling really triggered right now. And so I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna not say anything or do anything for a bit until this subsides and just allow that to kind of run its course. And now, usually within an hour, it's over, right? Not like it used to be, where triggers could last days, sometimes weeks, and be absolutely catastrophic emotionally. Because I've I've uh done enough healing and enough growing where now I still get triggered. Chitch still kind of, you know, kind of pushes the wrong buttons sometimes. But now I've got, you know, I've got a way of navigating through those things where it has little to no effect on my life. And that's what I want to help you achieve as well. You know, it's not like, you know, it's like having addiction, right? There's no cure for it, but there is absolutely a way that you can uh navigate through your addiction and recover from it and not engage in the addiction itself and uh and live a life that is completely happy and fulfilling, right? It doesn't mean just because you had, you know, you were uh using daily and or whatever that was and and lost a lot because of it. You know, your past doesn't equal your future. Just because you've struggled with stuff doesn't mean that you'll always struggle with stuff. You just need to learn some some new skills, some uh have some clarity around what is happening, and uh, and over time you will uh you'll be able to uh really just kind of tone down the volume of some of those triggers, heal your sense of self, deepen your relationships with other people, and uh and and live a life that feels uh awesome. And uh my goal is to help you achieve that. So thank you very much for listening. I'll talk to you soon.